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Jane Jacobs on why cities need ‘holes in the wall’

When neighbourhood stores are wiped out by redevelopment, so are community gathering places, urban theorist Jane Jacobs explains in this 1956 article.

Neighbourhood stores like these ones in East Harlem play a vital role in city life. "The least we can do is to respect — in the deepest sense — strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own," Jane Jacobs wrote 60 years ago. (HIROKO MASUIKE / The New York Times)

Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring, is published by Random House and on sale in bookstores across Canada Oct. 11.

By Jane Jacobs

Fri., Sept. 23, 2016

Sometimes you learn more about a phenomenon when it isn’t there, like water when the well runs dry — or like the neighbourhood stores which are not being built in our redeveloped city areas. In New York’s East Harlem, for instance, 1,110 stores have already vanished in the course of rehousing 50,000 people.

Planners and architects are apt to think, in an orderly way, of stores as a straightforward matter of supplies and services. Commercial space.

But stores in city neighbourhoods are much more complicated creatures which have evolved a much more complicated function. Although they are mere holes in the wall, they help make an urban neighbourhood a community instead of a mere dormitory.

A store is also a storekeeper. One supermarket can replace 30 neighbourhood delicatessens, fruit stands, groceries and butchers, as a Housing Authority planner explains. But it cannot replace 30 storekeepers or even one. The manager of a housing project in East Harlem says he spends three-fourths of his time on extraneous matters; he says: “I’m forced into trying to take the place of 40 storekeepers.” He is no better trained to handle this than a storekeeper and not as good at it because he does it grudgingly instead of out of pleasure of being a neighbourhood hub and busybody. Also it happens that most of the tenants heartily dislike him, but he is the best they have in the way of a public character in that super-block and they try to make him do.

The stores themselves are social centres — especially the bars, candy stores and diners.

A store is also often an empty store front. Into these fronts go all manner of churches, clubs and mutual uplift societies. These storefront activities are enormously valuable. They are the institutions that people create, themselves. Sometimes they end up famous. Many real ornaments to the city have started this way. The little struggling ones are even more important in the aggregate.

Most political clubs are in storefronts. When an old area is levelled, it is often a great joke that Wardheeler so-and-so has lost his organization. This is not really hilarious. If you are a nobody, and you don’t know anybody who isn’t a nobody, the only way you can make yourself heard in a large city is through certain well-defined channels. These channels all begin in holes in the wall. They start in Mike’s barbershop or the hole-in-the-wall office of a man called Judge, and they go on to the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club where Councilman Favini holds court, and now you are started on up. It all takes an incredible number of confabs. The physical provisions for this kind of process cannot conceivably be formalized.

When the holes in the wall disappear, several different things can happen. Stuyvesant Town in New York City clearly demonstrates one result. That development is now surrounded by an unplanned, chaotic, prosperous belt of stores, the camp followers around the Stuyvesant barracks. A good planner could handle that belt. Tucked in here are the hand-to-mouth co-operative nursery schools, the ballet classes, the do-it-yourself workshops, the little exotic stores which are among the great charms of a city. This same process happens whether the population is middle income like Stuyvesant Town or predominately low income like East Harlem.

Do you see what this means? Some very important sides of city life, much of the charm, the creative social activity and the vitality shift over to the old vestigial areas because there is literally no place for them in the new scheme of things. This is a ludicrous situation, and it ought to give planners the shivers.

When rebuilding happens wholesale, sometimes there is almost no convenient vestigial area left. In one project, in this fix, in East Harlem, the people are very much at loose ends. There is a “community centre” but it is a children’s centre. Some settlement house workers fine-tooth-combed that development of 2,000 people to find where they could make easygoing contact with adults. Absolutely the only place that showed signs of working as an adult social area was the laundry. We wonder if the planner of that project had any idea its heart would be in the basement. And we wonder if the architect had any idea what he was designing when he did that laundry. We wonder if it occurred to either of them that this represents one kind of social poverty beyond anything the slums ever knew.

Even in the projects a decade old the inhabitants do a lot of visiting in old neighbourhoods but relatively few visitors come to the new. Nothing to do.

There are degrees to which all this can be better or worse. Putting in shopping centres, defining neighbourhood units in proper geographic and population scale, mixing income groups and types of housing, and being very sensitive about just where the bulldozers go are all basic. There is already thinking, if not much action, about these matters.

Here are four added suggestions:

First, look at some lively old parts of the city. Notice the tenement with the stoop and sidewalk and how that stoop and sidewalk belong to the people there. A living room is not a substitute; this is a different facility. Notice the stores and the converted storefronts. Notice the taxpayers and up above, the bowling alley, the union local, the place where you learn the guitar. We do not suggest these units be copied, but that you think about these examples of the plaza, the marketplace and the forum, all very ugly and makeshift but very much belonging to the inhabitants, very intimate and informal.

Second, planners must become much more socially astute about the zoning of stores and the spotting of stores. Fortunately, in retail business economic and social astuteness can make fine allies if given a chance.

Third, architects must make the most out of such fortuitous social facilities as laundries, mailbox conglomerations and the adult hangouts at playgrounds. Much can be done to play up instead of play down the gregarious side of these seemingly trivial conveniences.

Fourth, we need far more care with outdoor space. It is not enough that it lets in light and air. It is not enough that unallocated space serve as a sort of easel against which to display the fine art of the buildings. In most urban development plans, the unbuilt space is a giant bore. The Gratiot plan for Detroit by Stonorov, Gruen and Yamasaki, which is not to be built, the Southwest Washington plan by I.M. Pei and some of the Philadelphia work such as Louis Kahn’s Mill Creek are unusual exceptions. The outdoor space should be at least as vital as the slum sidewalk.

There is the problem of what to do with activities that go into empty stores and basements. True, nobody planned for these among the old tenements and brownstones, but physically there were places to insinuate them. There is no such flexibility in rebuilt neighbourhoods. The answer is not in providing multi-purpose public rooms for them. They will die on the vine. The essence of these enterprises is that they have a place indisputably their own. Unless and until some solution for them can be found, the least we can do is to respect — in the deepest sense — strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.

We are greatly misled by talk about bringing the suburb into the city. The city has its own peculiar virtues and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the noncity. The starting point must be study of whatever is workable, whatever has charm, in city life, and these are the first qualities that must find a place in the architecture of the rebuilt city.

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